James Stewart - 18 July 1997

While I was away from the inferno of New York City, while I was standing and looking at the blissful, gentle rain falling on the covers of the centre court at Wimbledon, several things were happening in America that I should certainly have remarked on if I’d been here, so I remark on them now.

The first is a ceremony, a memorial service to a distinguished soldier, a brigadier general in the air force.

It must have been strange to see a solemn honour guard for this man and the sound of Taps from a lone bugler rising over those bare, brown mountains. What was strange about this austere military service, conducted before a small congregation in a half-empty church, was that it was happening in Hollywood, California, and that the general being honoured was better known to the world as a movie star.

Not long after the second war was over, James Stewart arrived at a grand hotel in Madrid (where he’d been booked in) to make a movie in Spain. The director (I think it was with him) confidently asked the reservation clerk if Mr James Stewart’s suite was ready. The clerk whispered tensely, “Is it the James Stewart?” Indeed it was.

The man was mortified. If he’d been a character in a novel, he would have wrung his hands, a gesture I have never seen done in life. He sorrowfully explained that the owner of the hotel had long ago banned all movie stars from staying in his hotel. It had happened once, it seems; and, after some unfortunate gaffe, the star had shown himself unworthy of a hotel that catered only to ladies and gentlemen. The star was told to leave and, in Groucho Marx’s words, “Never darken our towels again.”

The director, who was accompanying Stewart, was stumped. Stewart himself, shuffling in the awkward manner that was as natural to him in life as it was to him on the screen, dived into an inner pocket and produced some sort of identity card. “Maybe,” he murmured, “this would help.” The clerk looked at it and leapt in delight. “Of course, Major General Stewart’s suite will be ready immediately.” And, I’m told, the man started snapping his fingers with the practiced air of a Flamenco dancer.

I stress this side of Stewart’s character to begin with because though he was not unique, he attained the highest military rank of those actors who, once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, did not pull strings, pull off a commission and spend a gallant war making training films in Hollywood. You’d be surprised at the many famous ones, strident patriots all, who did that.

James Stewart, in a day and a night, was Private Stewart. He did his 20 missions over Germany as a bomber pilot, emerged from the war as a full colonel, but didn’t retire from the service until 1968.

He had returned to Hollywood, like David Niven most notably among English soldier actors, without any guarantee that his career would pick up where it left off. But it did – so, happily, did David Niven’s – and for the next 30 years chose his films, performed inimitably, and retired.

He married late, at 41, had twin daughters, and for the next 45 years even the tabloids raked up no scandal because there was none to find. Three years ago his wife died and he became a recluse.

In the Hollywood Presbyterian church where Stewart and his family worshipped every week for years, one of the daughters stood before the few old friends there – he’d asked for no sort of public fuss at his funeral – and she gave a very short talk which ended with a quotation from a favourite movie: “No man is poor who has friends.” And here, the daughter said with a slight tremor, “To my father, the richest man in town.”

An oddity. Considered as an American social type, he was very familiar: small-town, rural, conservative. Considered as a movie star, he was almost a freak, a devout churchman, exemplary husband, scandal-free, modest. Altogether, a period piece.

At this point, I suspect that A Letter From America is going to turn into A Letter From The Americas. I was in New York just late enough to catch the handing over – or return, or surrender, according to taste – of Hong Kong to the Chinese.

In time, too, to applaud the one journalist, I believe, who did not go to Hong Kong for the party, but had the wit to go to Bermuda and pick up that remarkable story I talked about of Bermuda’s rejoicing over the transfer, most especially the transfer to Bermuda of securities, stock from almost half of all the companies listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange from ship owners to real-estate dealers, including some of the Chinese government’s own holding companies.

Well, when the Hong Kong ceremony was all over, I noticed that most British leader writers and commentators concluded that once and for all, the empire had closed down. "All that remains," wrote one columnist, "is about a dozen lumps of rock in the Caribbean."

I wonder how many journalists on their way home from Hong Kong thought to look over those lumps of rock scattered over a wide ocean and see how their inhabitants were taking the end of empire.

Well there was one reporter. And wouldn’t you guess, it was that same Larry Rohter who skipped Hong Kong to bring us the astonishing story about the coming bonanza in Bermuda.

From there, he went on to Bridgetown, Barbados, which appears to have been his base for a tour of the dozen English-speaking nations beginning up in the Bahamas off the tip of Florida, down across the 1500 mile stretch that takes in Jamaica in the Caribbean, all the way east to Barbados and down to tiny Grenada off the coast of Venezuela.

All these lumps of rock are, in literal fact, mostly beautiful, lush tropical islands, and their main industry is tourism, followed by the same characteristic crops – bananas, cotton, sugar especially and its derivative, the demon rum.

They elect their own governments, they have their own police forces and tiny armies and boast that they conduct their own foreign policy. But a threat to one tends to mobilise a quick alliance of their neighbours, as happened when a swift Marxist coup in Grenada caused the neighbours and President Reagan to invade Grenada without Mrs Thatcher’s permission.

What had Mrs Thatcher to do with it? Ah, there we touch on something more ominous that the scattered dozen have in common. They have governors appointed from London. They recognise the Privy Council as their highest court – a fact that has begun to gall them; or, as Antony said, “to grate.” So much so, that in Bridgetown, Barbados, a commission has been sitting to decide whether to break the last link with England and the monarchy and set up an independent republic, and Mr Rohter reports that all across the Caribbean similar proposals are being advanced.

It’s not a case of looking longingly at all the former colonies that have gone it on their own. These dozen are united by a single powerful grievance. It’s the Privy Council in London. They want to break this legal tie, or rather to reject its authority, and one action of the council more than another sparked this revolt.

Four years ago, the council handed down a ruling that anyone convicted of a capital crime must be executed within five years. If he were held any longer, he could be declared to have suffered inhuman punishment and have the sentence commuted; presumably to life imprisonment.

I’m pretty sure that the council’s motives were sincerely rooted in distress over, not to say disgust, with the American system where in the states that allow capital punishment, the interval between a death sentence and the execution of it, the average pause on Death Row, is about 12 years. It can go sometimes as long as 20.

This is due to the elaborate, twisting, legal maze which offers the guilty countless appeals and counter-appeals, and that maze has been constructed down the years by the people – including the Supreme Court – who have tried to give the widest possible interpretation to the rights of the individual.

However, the effect of this Privy Council ruling on Barbados has been irritating to say the least; even more so on the island of Jamaica, which has a horrendous crime problem.

Last year, just under a thousand people were murdered there, about the going rate in New York City whose population is three times as large. As it is, the law in those islands allows a fair interval of appeal, but human rights groups fear that if the council’s ruling is abandoned, there’ll be a rush to the execution block.

It comes down in these islands, as elsewhere, to the universal debate over capital punishment. Barbados, Jamaica and the other islands have a legal system which humanely follows every avenue that leads to a certain conclusion of guilt, but they don’t want to be told that after five years no more capital punishment. They have a terrible time housing the increasing number of violent criminals and obviously think that if the Privy Council’s dictate is followed, some very fearsome characters will have to be taken off Death Row and maintained for life.

Among other humane institutions, Amnesty International has announced its sympathy with the islands that have to house so many notorious criminals already condemned to death, but declares that the death penalty is no solution to a capital crime.

The Barbadians, the Trinidadians, the Jamaicans probably think so too, but the alternative – having to house them for life after five years on the Row – puts an impossible strain on the taxes, the housing, the lives of the islands’ inhabitants, most of whom, as any tourist will attest, are very poor people.

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